The release of the Ghostbusters reboot has proven to be a fascinating experience. Even as someone who tends to be a little hard on hyped-up new releases, I felt that the movie itself was a lot of fun and pretty well put together, but the public response to it has been widely negative. Internet hearsay the day of the release told me I shouldn’t even bother seeing it, and interestingly, the scores for it on user-generated sites like IMDb have been significantly lower than the critic-generated reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this negative response is more the result of our current social climate than the actual quality of the film. The first point working against it is that it’s a reboot of a hugely popular cult film, which puts it in the position of being compared to the nostalgia-elevated, very-original-for-its-time, pre-CGI original. The second reason it’s getting negative response is that (wait for it, cause I’m gonna say it) all the main characters are women and the only male characters are dumb or need saving or both. Yeah, everybody, I went there, I called the internet sexist. I’m sure this totally unknown and unforeseeable piece of information completely blew your mind.
Spoilers below the cut!
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 